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自由發揮 for all my Taiwanese music.
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Mar 10, 2012 14:34
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OrangeGuy posted:For someone whose smartphone is probably going to go kaput in the near future and wants to buy an iPhone 4S with the possibility of using it in Taiwan as well as the US, what should I do? I am moving to China in a few and just bought a new smartphone, so I've done this research. If you buy it under a contract at AT&T, you'll be obligated to either pay for whatever the contract is (with a smartphone like that you're usually locked at about $100~ a month) or pay a fee for cancelling the contract. This fee is based on how many months you have left on on your contract, and works out to your iPhone costing about 800 dollars while still locked and filled with AT&T's bloatware. The global component for verizon will be gargantuan compared to any service you get in Asia. Again, I'm Taiwan-ignorant, but in the mainland 3G data costs like 10-20USD a month, and texts are like 5. This is very, very cheap. I'm assuming Taiwan isn't much worse. Unlocked phones are much cheaper in Asia and Europe as a whole. If you must have an iPhone it's probably cheaper to go to Taiwan or HK and buy one there. If you buy an unlocked phone you'll either have to pay for international or get a new plan from TMobile or ATT in the US, but not being on contract means you can pick some very cheap data plan and some very affordable unlimited data plan instead of having to go all in on some 100 dollar a month nonsense. edit: Looked around online and it looks like iPhone4S in Taiwan is between like 20000-21000NTD, which is like 680-700ish USD. Ailumao fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Apr 25, 2012 |
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Apr 25, 2012 15:51
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TetsuoTW posted:Pretty sure those prices are what I've seen for specifically US iPhone 4S'. Honestly I don't even know if there is a local version yet. Yeah, I double checked and that's about the same price as the ones in the mainland from HK. Moral of story: Apple poo poo is expensive.
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Apr 25, 2012 16:23
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There's no contract-free data/phone plans in Taiwan? That's depressing. Maybe I won't go there to do research now!
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Apr 25, 2012 16:44
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Ah, I misread his post. On that note, I might be coming to Taiwan for like a month or however long I can stay without a visa this fall. How hard would it be for me to find an apartment short-term in Taibei or Gaoxiong?
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Apr 25, 2012 17:05
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And there's always the WACKY and INSANE option of buying an android, as unlocked droid phones newer than the iPhone4S (Galaxy Note, Galaxy Nexus, HTC's newer stuff) only cost like 400-500 unlocked and can be obtained much more easily!
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Apr 27, 2012 03:07
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VideoTapir posted:I'm in mainland China now, and have been entertaining the idea of going to Taiwan. It sounds like everything that's great about China with very little of what isn't. This hard:  Unless they've changed something recently (and that's very possible), she needs to apply for a Taiwan pass (大陆居民往来台湾通行证) from the PRC government, then apply for a sort-of-but-not-really-visa from the Taiwanese government. I know in the past they made Mainland people come as part of a tour group (a la 老外 in Tibet), but if you had enough money (some random stuff I found said a 5万RMB would do it) you could get out of that requirement. I have no idea what having a foreign husband will do to this requirement. http://www.easytrip.com.tw/CtoT/travels/procedure.asp Here's a site explaining the details pretty well. It's from like 2010 though, so I don't know how accurate it is. I do know this is significantly less work than in like 2008-2009. I studied abroad there and they could not sent this one TA with us because she was a PRC citizen and the amount of red tape/money was just too high. Why is it so hard to go to just some province, anyway? v  vIf you do end up going, depending on when and where you are it can be really, really expensive. While there are direct flights from Beijing and Shanghai, when I was entertaining the idea of heading over it was still usually cheaper to get to HK and go from there. What is probably cheapest option is actually sort of fun though, and would make for a good vacation. You can go to Xiamen (Which is a decent city, if you haven't been), then take a boat to Jinmen. Jinmen is technically part of Taiwan, but has essentially no restrictions on entry and exit and is basically a weird little tourist island. It's a neat little island that I've heard is a decent place to stay for a day or two. From there, you can get a pretty cheap plane ticket to Taipei. Ailumao fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Apr 29, 2012 |
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Apr 29, 2012 16:09
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Haraksha posted:
My favorite thing is most of em are wearing contacts behind their frame-less glasses anyway.
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May 1, 2012 15:26
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Ravendas posted:What's with the dirty simplified? This is the Taiwan thread! 對不對!
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May 2, 2012 15:45
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SB35 posted:There are some nice reclining chairs to sleep on near the McDonald's in Terminal 3. McD's is open 24 hours whereas everything else closes at like 11pm. Also free wireless internet and outlets around there so you can surf or watch movies or whatever. I'm pretty sure you're just stuck in the airport. If Chinese visas were so easy to get we could just grab 'em on the go in the airport everyone's lives would be so much easier. I do wonder how it will work though with customs and stuff. Is Taiwan technically an international flight????? I MEAN IT'S THE SAME COUNTRY, RIGHT?
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May 4, 2012 03:49
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Hey, what's a ballpark salary for someone teaching 18 hours a week in Taipei? My sister is applying around and has some offers. If anyone here knows of decent jobs starting in the fall though, I could get you two in contact. She has a year of experience teaching English in the mainland and is thinking about jumping across the strait.
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May 24, 2012 14:46
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I have never heard that term in the mainland. Though, these days 爱风 is the hip new thing.
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Jul 18, 2012 12:20
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Haraksha posted:You can take that that simplified nonsense and go straight to Mao-ist hell. A lot of my Taiwanese friends say this then go writing the Japanese の's in lieu of 的's 
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Jul 19, 2012 02:15
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TetsuoTW posted:I'm OK with that, given that Japan did run the place for 50 years and also aren't threatening to wipe us off the face of the Earth on a regular basis. But but but traditional  culture!Also that simplification schemes were discussed as early as the Qing Dynasty and first carried out when Sun Yat-Sen and the 国民党 were in charge.
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Jul 19, 2012 06:05
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TetsuoTW posted:That's really just the case for the expats that are too lazy to get a real name or who don't speak Chinese. It's basically Default Name. I know plenty of expats who get names from friends. My Chinese given name was originally - briefly - just the default for my English name, 傑夫, which I can't say I've ever seen used by an actual Chinese person. A friend in Hong Kong helped me change it up, partly because that name sucks and partly because the English-Chinese sound match doesn't work in Cantonese for that particular name, so ever since I've been 哲夫 (which I have seen used by a local. Once.) I still use the name 利瑪竇 gave the dude in the Bible whose name I share. Too many people knew me by that name before I became self conscious of it, and I just lazied it up and stuck with it. It is slightly better than most Sinifications, though.
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Jul 22, 2012 15:42
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So I read this article: http://ns2.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2012/07/17/2003537940 and am wondering if anyone knows exactly what sort of stuff Ma is trying to get changed. Beisdes a few words like Nipponization I couldn't really glean many specifics.
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Jul 23, 2012 09:26
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Haraksha posted:Totally a Taiwan thing. I'm dreading going to the mainland. The only real difference is in the mainland, every Taiwan-sized piece of land (or smaller) messes everything up in their own unique way. Hangzhou and Zhejiang in general have roughly the same crap going on as in Taiwan though, if you want to feel at home.
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Sep 7, 2012 14:30
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TetsuoTW posted:p. sure that's not "stay away from Android," that's "stay away from Samsung." Seems to be more "Stay away from Samsung phones with Google branding". My Samsung Galaxy Note does everything these HTC phones do, hell I even got an update from 2.whatever to 4.0 last spring on my European phone while I was in the US using an AT&T gophone simcard before the phone was even available in the US. I can use it as a personal hot spot, etc... Pictures in native resolution so you can all imagine holding that in your hand like I do every day!  Obviously hitting the 中 switches from Chinese to English input. Hitting the button next to the enter/return key brings up a bunch of possible inputs:  my favorite 成语 for Chinese and  for English if you are super pro with old fashion 9key input, I guess! Seems like dtb just picked the wrong samsung android phone since my Samsung does everything he wants his too. It is loving ginormous, though. Ailumao fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Nov 25, 2012 |
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Nov 25, 2012 05:31
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How do you Taiwan goons get (paid) apps if you're on an Android device? Do you just acquire them through other means? Is there another Android store you can use? Do you just fake-out your phones and make them think you're in basically any other territory?
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Jan 16, 2013 06:32
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blinkyzero posted:Thanks guys, great advice. I know of zhuyin but have been using pinyin for my self-study these last few months, so I'll likely stick with that. I have heard zhuyin's the fastest way to text in Chinese, though. Zhuyin is really no faster than Pinyin for phones once you learn to let predictive text (and download Sougou or Google IME instead of whatever stock crap your phone has) take the wheel. I very rarely type out more than 2 letters of any characters these days. I have one friend who can use cangjie (but he's from Guangdong so...) and he is a loving demon on his phone. I've also heard wubi can be crazy fast. They both require a knowledge and recall of characters most native Chinese speakers don't have, though... and that's the main reason why most Mandarin speakers just use a phonetic system. Also this was a bunch of posts ago, something ya'll (Mainly that one guy I forgot to quote) westerners have to realize is Pinyin was not designed to be a replacement for characters, wasn't meant to be a Romanization system, nor was it originally intended to help foreigners learn the langauge. It was meant to be a pronunciation guide because when what would become Pinyin and Zhuyin started development in the post-1911 era there was no real good, standardized way to show pronunciation. All they had was this ancient system where you used the beginning of one character and the ending of another character to denote the pronunciation of a character and if you didn't know the guide character's pronunciations you were sort of hosed. Also there were a bunch of rules about tone and some characters didn't use their normal pronunciations when being used as a guide... it was a real messy system. Also it was really only any good for ancient Chinese. 切韵 was it's name if you wanna look it up and see how crazy that poo poo was. Unlike Wade Giles or Yale, which were designed by foreigners to help other foriegners pronounce poo poo and were actually based on a knowledge of what letters sounded like in English, Pinyin and Zhuyin were developed by Chinese to help Chinese people pronounce Chinese. I've never once heard anyone complain about French or Italian or Czech being hard to prononce because they use mostly the same letters as we do with wildly different pronunciations, but I guess there aren't really alternatives for those and this is a bad analogy. Anyway, pinyin is a pretty drat good system when you look at it as a way for Chinese people to know how to pronounce poo poo and less as "man I already know these letters but now they all CRAZY" Honestly I think they're about the same, one just took more of an influence from Japanese kana and one had Zhou Youguang being lazy and saying "gently caress it lets use these letters someone else already made." I tried to lear Zhuyin a lifetime ago but I was already too entrenched into Pinyin by that point and I didn't see the point. They're both decently designed systems with some individual pros and cons, but they both get the job of "how do I pronounce this with as little ambiguity as possible?" done pretty well. Essentially, I'm real sorry a bunch of dudes in China in the 30s were more concerned with creating an effective pronunication guide for the something-hundred million illiterate Chinese people who'd never heard a word of putonghua (nevermind any western language) than they were aboutin how people from the west would have issues pronouncing this poo poo 70 years down the line. It's almost like we weren't the things they really cared about or something.
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Jan 30, 2013 16:38
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quadrophrenic posted:Not really, in my experience. You'll usually find some English speakers in banks and hospitals and stuff, especially in the downtown Taipei City area, but it's not like your average dumpling stand speaks perfect English. Back when I first studied abroad in Taipei over a summer in uni, our teacher took us to some random shopping area, put us in pairs and told us the name of a bookstore we needed to find by asking people for directions. Me and my partner, with a year of 3 Chinese classes a week behind us, set out to complete this task. The first person we came across had no idea what we were saying and in pretty good English asked us where we wanted to go. My partner, wanting to do this thing right, said "I don't speak English" or something in German because he'd studied it for a while. The girl's face lit up and she started speaking incredibly fast and fluent German. Thankfully for the integrity of the assignment, the girl was from Germany, was visiting family in Taipei and had no idea where the place was. That said, if you decide to feign not being an English speaker don't gently caress it up.
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Feb 11, 2013 10:24
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Haraksha posted:Seems like Taiwan finally relented on their download app return policy and Google Play has reopened the pay store with a 15 minute return window. Yeah, it's not available to all devs yet. I can't wait till it is, then finally all this traditional Chinese stuff I made can go to use!
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Feb 28, 2013 08:14
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I dunno, do you really need a 7 day return policy on a 50NTD smartphone game? I get that the idea is they want to protect consumers, but a 7 day return policy on mobile software seems a little ridiculous. That said, completely outside of return policies, it's actually infinitely easier to get a refund from Google than Apple anyway. Google allows developers to do refunds themselves and will often just refund you themselves if you give a decent reason such as "runs like poo poo on my phone or doesn't run at all" Apple never refunds unless something crazy happens.
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Feb 28, 2013 09:47
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So it's been like 2 weeks with paid apps available in Taiwan, and I can assure you no one is buying anything! Hooray!
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Mar 14, 2013 04:06
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TetsuoTW posted:Hasn't stopped the Tourism Bureau vainly pretending it is, though. God they're so bad at their job. I think companies in the Mainland do a better job of this. 台式 things are all very hip. Lots and lots of places all over China advertise 台湾小吃 like crazy. Ironically enough it's never anything I remember being super common in Taiwan itself. All I remember from my time in Taipei is stinky tofu and jipai everywhere, along with other basic Chinese/Asian fare, but here everything that's advertised as "Taiwanese" is stuff like fried pancakes and Japanese stuff like takoyaki.
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Mar 24, 2013 02:39
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I dunno if it's cause it was the first time I was in Asia or what, but the danbing I got in the mornings on my way to class in Taipei in like 2008 were the best drat danbing I've ever had. Here in the mainland danbing is still good, but over there it was much more like a crepe, and bacon and cheese were things you could get put in it. The best thing was this sick as hell garlic sauce the dude gave us to dip it in. Basically that is all I associate Taiwan with and I'm going there this summer with the sole intention of finding that dude.
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Mar 24, 2013 06:59
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TetsuoTW posted:Yeah but Korea is like the Michael Jordan of racism. I actually have two gay Korean friends who moved from Korea to China for work and are amazed at how "open and accepting" China is of gay people. 
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Mar 25, 2013 09:27
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USDA Choice posted:I can't speak for Korea but I'm sure most of you have noticed how there's almost no hatred based on religious views compared to western countries. I've personally only seen negative opinions in China/Taiwan because of 1) the "heeby-jeebies" factor and 2) probably won't bear any children. Korea is also one of the most Christian nations on the planet! But I'm not sure if that really does anything besides give them an excuse. From what I've heard about Japan they're not the best place to be either and they have hardly any religious stuff going on, though. Taiwan, on the other hand, is one of the most progressive places in Asia as far as LGBT rights go. In a lot of ways it beats out large portions of Europe and the States. They even introduced a bill for gay marriage way back when which got stomped In China it's weird cause it was illegal like two decades ago and considered a mental illness 10 years ago, and now the basic mindset is a basically DADT. Hardly anyone goes around saying they're gay, and no one really bothers anyone who is gay. Younger people are pretty open as well.
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Mar 25, 2013 12:21
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hitension posted:^30% is not "one of the most Christian nations ever", it's just one of the most Christian nations in Asia. I was about to say "the most", but I almost forgot the Philippines.  It is one of the fastest, if not the fastest[citation needed], growing Christian nation. 4 of the 5 largest congregations in the world are in Seoul. Christianity (especially Catholicism) is also actually on the rise in Korea while it's declining in most of Europe and North America. Sorry for my hyperbole. I should have said Korea is unlike the rest of E. Asia in that it is Christian/religious to the extent it is likely not a trivial influence on the way homosexuals are regarded rather poorly there. On to Taiwan things: Has anyone been to Kinmen/Jinmen? When I head to Taiwan this summer I'm going via the Xiamen-Kinmen-Tai??? route and wondering if it's worthwhile to stay there for a day or two. It's supposed to be a nice beach place, but I've been told that about some pretty crappy places in Asia before.
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Mar 25, 2013 15:16
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USDA Choice posted:I've never been and I haven't heard about nice beaches, but if you're a military/political history buff I'd definitely go for it. Other than that I hear Penghu mentioned a lot more for island vacations, though I suspect a lot of that has to do with proximity. I'll be going regardless since it's by far the cheapest route from the mainland to Taiwan and thought it'd be neat to just hang out there for a day or two. Guess I'll just plan for that and hope the weather is nice and hang around to see what's up.
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Mar 26, 2013 07:56
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hitension posted:Oh dear I'm glad I noticed there was another page cause I had something all written up for this! What a cool guy. The embodiment of all socially inept, completely unqualified, entitled western dudes in Asia right here. Also he's bad at Taiwan since he doesn't even know that Taiwan girls are easy.
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Apr 10, 2013 14:20
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Atlas Hugged posted:I do think a lot more people come here on recommendations rather than just coming here because there was a pre-existing reputation or recruiters spammed the internet looking for forlorn college graduates. However, I don't think that most of the people here are just here for the sex and partying. I think it's easy to think that because most foreigners who come are English teachers and they tend to skew towards the recently graduated from college demographic, who would be partying and loving anywhere on the planet. Taiwanese people do this too, but foreigners just seem more open about it. I think every country in Asia has different expat/foreigner "groups". When I was in Taipei I was like 21 and still a student, but all I did was go out to parties and stuff. Most of the people I met that weren't my classmates (We were at Ming Chuan University, which didn't have a huge number of 留学生) were ESL teachers. I thought every night was a CRAZY PARTY!!!  Now I'm a very old 26 year old and in Chengdu I rarely go to clubs or anything anymore. My few foreign friends are all just dudes who hang out, study Chinese, and organize kickball leagues and long bike rides. Korea probably has this kind of people too, but as they aren't out at the same bars every night they might be harder to find. I think it has a lot to do with your age, really. Not to say I haven't seen 45 year old white dudes being idiots at bars in China.
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May 2, 2013 03:27
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Newegg China isn't that great (isn't that bad either), hoping you guys get better! The mainland version is better for stuff like toasters and ovens than PC parts.
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May 11, 2013 09:30
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duckfarts posted:
You can register more than one, but it requires factory resetting the device every time you want to switch accounts and having a separate memory card for each account. It's not terribly time consuming (takes about 10 minutes to do) but is sort of annoying.
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May 31, 2013 15:26
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I played Chinese fan translations of a few SRW games and they were half awesome and half awesomely bad.
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Jun 1, 2013 13:36
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I think that mentality is widely with young male ESL teachers, for whatever reason. Since I got out of that business and got a real, non-buxiban job, I've found people are a lot cooler and poo poo. The circle of friends I have now is probably half Chinese and half not, most of the foreigners speak decent to excellent Chinese (and the Chinese decent English), and everyone is basically a normal person. We even do things that aren't going out to bars, which is pretty awesome. I really hope Taipei has these kind of people as well because I may have to move there for work in the next year and I'd hate for it to somehow be a social-downgrade from the mainland... My only experience in Taiwan was when I was a student there, and foreign students live in the most secluded of bubble worlds, so I'm woefully ignorant about the place I lived for 6 months. 
Ailumao fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Jun 3, 2013 |
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Jun 3, 2013 06:42
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Bloodnose posted:You should've gone with a program that came with a local roommate. That's good advice for every language program everywhere. Even if your own roommate is super goony and never wants to do anything (this happened to me), among your classmates' roommates there will at least be a few social jerks who get you out and seeing the local culture and doing things. Yeah, I've since done this, but that wasn't really an option. It was a partnership between my US uni and Ming Chuan university. We "had" to stay in Ming Chuan's international dorms which were in a high-rise in the city center and came with HBO in every room. Our classes were also held in the same building but on a different floor. The first floor had a McDonald's and 7-11 too. Those dorms were essentially set up to create a bubble of international students. Needless to say, I did not learn much Chinese there. I learned much more the next time when we were dropped into dorms with Real Live Chinese people in the mainland the next year. My professor now makes all students stay in the much crappier but probably much better for learning Chinese dorms on the top of the hill by Shilin Night Market now, likely because we all just stuck around our hotel-dorm and talked to Germans and British students who were also "studying" abroad. Ailumao fucked around with this message at 07:57 on Jun 3, 2013 |
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Jun 3, 2013 07:55
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HappyHelmet posted:I know the school I went to had a pretty easy to get into scholarship program. The problem was staying in it as they expect you to spend a large amount of time at the school studying your rear end off, and you couldn't miss more than a few days of class either. I think it was expected that you would do double your class time in homework every day. Oh, and you needed to score like a 90% on all of your tests and what not. I dunno, I don't think it's ridiculous for a program to have standards. They are kind of putting the cash up for it, after all. Most people I know with actually impressive Chinese did that in either Taiwan or the Mainland. 3 months of that style of learning certainly kicked me up a few notches. I sort of wish I could have done it for a year. To answer the question about scholarships, the Chinese Language Megathread has some resources in the OP. The stuff about Taiwan may be a little outdated, but you can pretty easily get a scholarship from the ministry of education to study there iirc. Anyone with more up to date info is welcome to chime in. edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8jkSSolABw People in Taipei should go to this cause I can't cause I am stuck in Pollutionburg
Ailumao fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Jun 3, 2013 |
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Jun 3, 2013 15:59
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When I lived in Taiwan like 5 years ago Watson's always had a lot of Old Spice, right guard, Axe/Lynx, etc... I guess it was half a decade ago but I doubt they became less-open to foreign things...
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Jun 24, 2013 11:12
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Atlas Hugged posted:Actually, a lot of places have. I think over the last decade, there's been a large influx of foreign brands and products and most of them simply aren't purchased by Taiwanese people. A handful become part of their daily lives, like coke and whiskey, but the rest fall by the wayside, like Eggos, Sour Skittles, Cherry Coke, and things that make your body smell good. Sour Skittles have recently appeared all over the mainland as a real made-for-China thing, as have cookies and creme hershey bars and those weird M&Ms with rice crispies in them. I'M WAITING FOR PEANUT BUTTER M&Ms!!!!!!
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Jun 24, 2013 14:35
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